Pages

How to be remembered forever: some career advice

Here's a little game to play. Get out a sheet of paper (or open Word, or whatever), and down the side, number lines 1 to 17.

Now on each line, list 3 or 4 people from that century. So for line number 1, list 3 people who lived anywhere within 100AD to 199AD. (Yes, I know the 100s are the 2nd century; I'm avoiding ordinals to eliminate confusion) For line 15, list anyone who lived during the 1500s, & etc. Do this for all 17 lines.

I did this. Here are my observations. If you want to give it a try, stop reading and play the game now!

Some centuries are really hard! Some are fairly easy. I deliberately started at 1 because the century 0-99 is way too easy. Anyone with even a slight knowledge of the Bible or the Roman Empire can whip off lots of names. It gets trickier from 100AD onwards. I stopped at 1799 because likewise, the period 1800 to the present is too recent to be a challenge.

I found with the tricky centuries that once I got one famous person located, I could pick off others. So for example I happen to know Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas day, 800AD. That instantly gave me the Sultan Haroun al-Rashid, who I know was his contemporary, and Roland his knight, of Song of Roland fame, and Carca, who withstood a siege from Charlemagne and gave her name to Carcasonne.

Have a look at your list. I'd be willing to bet almost every name you wrote falls into one of these groups:

Is a national leader.
Is an artist.
Is a scientist.
Is a religious figure.
Is a military commander.

That's it! If you're a chartered accountant, you're fresh out of luck in the fame stakes. And for all but the popular centuries, such as the Renaissance, it's a struggle to recall more then a few names.

This makes me wonder who a thousand years from now will be remembered from the 20th century. You might think lots and lots, because so much happened; but much happens in every century, and this little exercise shows the number of people destined for immortality is probably not more than a handful.

Here are my own suggestions for 20th century immortality. I've cut ruthlessly, keeping in mind the lesson of trying to name people from a thousand years ago.

Einstein. The quintessential scientist.Hitler. An evil man, but he put his stamp on the century like no other political leader.Lennon & McCartney. Easily the greatest artists, or if you don't like greatest, then best known.

17 comments:

Unfortunately, I have to agree with Hitler. He's worse than Pol Pot, Stalin, and all the other despots from that century combined. And there were a lot of them!

To offer a counter to Hitler, I'd toss in Gandhi. I would add Martin Luther King Jr. or Nelson Mandela instead, but since they got their ideas from Gandhi (who got them from Henry David Thoreau), we'll just stick with Gandhi.

I'll give you Einstein too, but I'll see your Lennon/McCartney and raise you a Picasso. Lennon did influence the world of protests though. That's a tough one.

The mega-rich might be very comfortable, but they don't seem to become iconic. Unless, of course, their name is Croessus. Likewise I'm not sure if inventors really stick in the mind above their inventions? How many people would have listed Hero for the steam engine in the first century, above all those Roman Emperors and Biblical figures? Or maybe last century was so inventive that it opened a whole new category of immortals?

Interesting that Martin Luther King is so (very reasonably) a popular choice in the US, because if you asked the 2 billion or so people in the Far East he would never have entered their heads; but Mao Tse Tung and Gandhi would be obvious hits.

I'm going to suggest one other candidate for 20th century immortality: Sherlock Holmes. I'd be willing to bet that a thousand years from now people will be writing vastly erudite papers on whether or not he was a real person.

Interesting you put Holmes in the 20th century – I'd have placed him in the 19th by weight of cases – although The Hound of the Baskervilles is probably the most famous of them.

I think Hitler clinches it over Stalin - although I disagree with Stephanie Thornton: Stalin did manage to oversee/order the killing/starvation of an estimated 15-30,000,000 people which puts him way and above any of the other 20th century dictators on the victim count. Somehow Stalin looks friendly where Hitler wears his twisted evil heart on his sleeve.

I was born a Beatles fan so no arguments on the Lennon and McCartney score. I'm going to be a near neighbour of Macca's soon – I'm moving a few miles from his East Sussex home. I'm sure he'll be around to borrow a cup of sugar and to play the odd game of monopoly. (I also used to live in Carcassonne, about ten years ago)

There could be someone from the last century whom we have overlooked who will be significant to people 1,000 years from now: Here is the Trudi Smith memorial park. Trudi, inventor of the coffee grounds recycler, was overlooked in her own time whilst being worshiped in ours.

I can't see a database administrator making it - not that I went into database administration thinking it would make me one of the three most famous men of any century.

Hmm, you specified “lived in” a given century rather than spent the bulk of his or her career in that century. In that case, I nominate Cezanne, who painted some of his greatest works in the last years of his life (he died in 1906) and is vastly more influential (and greater) than Lennon and McCartney will ever be. ====================== Detectives Beyond Borders"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/

I loved your list; it's easy to see you're an arts lover. Also you pulled out some names that would never, ever have occurred to me, such as Po Chü-I. It makes me wonder whether these lists tell us something about ourselves? They might be a personality diagnostic.

Gary, there's no doubt the lists tell us something about ourselves. You can tell which are my favorite eras in art and public affairs, for instance.

Some of those great people had an annoying habit of spanning the arbitrary division of centuries. But what would you or I know about that? ====================== Detectives Beyond Borders"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/

All images on this site belong to Gary Corby, or are licensed under Wikimedia Commons, or in rare instances may be marked as belonging to someone else. You are welcome to my images for private and educational use. You may not use them for commercial purposes.

The background is the cover of Sacred Games, art created by Stefano Vitale. Picture Window template. Powered by Blogger.